OCZ is showing the first mainstream computer flash drive using 3-bit NAND at CES 2012.
Flash comes in single-level cell (SLC) form, the fastest, longest-lived and most expensive, and also a 2-bit multi-level cell (MLC) variant which is slower, has a shorter working life but is less expensive than SLC. TLC is an extension of …

Right direction(s)!

There's room for improvement along many axes. I'd _love_ to replace the 1TB ($100, AnteDiluvian) data disk in my laptop with a $500 SSD if all I got was 50% of the seek time improvements of current high-end MLCs. I don't need _fast_ or extreme reliability for what I do, just (!) <0.1ms and >250MB/s reads, and bulk, bulk, bulk. [Once you SSD you never go back!]

So pushing for cheapest-possible, 3+-year lifetime SSDs is fine by me, and I'm happy that OCZ, etc. have the prospect of Big Profits from replacing more consumer HDs, as well as from tweaking bulletproof N*100k IOPS/s "Enterprise" database index drives, and from satisfying run-of-the-mill speed freaks (my boot disk is a fast SSD, and longterm reliability is frankly not an issue there either -- do any decently paid and supported data geeks keep their primary computer for more than 3 years?)

[ Beer because Tuesday is far away from Friday. And because $500/TB SSDs are a few generations away. Both make me sad, so I drink. ]

Shrinking the cell isn't much different than increasing the number of variable charges that a cell holds. My only fear is that some company will sell TLC as MLC since the 'M' stands for multi. and they'd probably have some disclaimer in an extremely small/unreadable font.